Monday, January 19, 2015

Proposed SOMETHING WICKED film updates story to 1980s

Since the announcement last year that Seth Grahame-Smith was attached to a new film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, there has been a period of silence. This week, Entertainment Weekly has provided an update. And the biggest news is that the film itself will update Bradbury's story - to the 1980s. This, Graham-Smith reports, is the era of his own childhood, "the most authentic time that I know how to represent."

This strikes me as incredibly faulty logic - like updating Huckleberry Finn to the 1970s.

The EW article is a survey of Grahame-Smith's current projects - and there are plenty of them: not only Something Wicked but proposed re-boots of Beetlejuice and Stephen King's It, among others. This is one busy writer-producer-director.

Something Wicked is reported as being scripted by David Leslie Johnson, from a treatment by Grahame-Smith. Johnson began his career as an assistant to Frank Darabont on The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead; his biggest screenwriting credit to date is for The Wrath of the Titans. The earliest the film might go before the cameras is late 2015, but my recommendation (as always) is: don't hold your breath.